The Secret Life of
Fighter Command
Contents
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1 The Celestial Ballet
Chapter 2 The Vision of Wings
Chapter 3 The Seduction of Flight
Chapter 4 The Lines in the Heavens
Chapter 5 The Secret Under the Hill
Chapter 6 We Are At War
Chapter 7 Dress Rehearsals
Chapter 8 ‘Interesting Work of a Confidential Nature’
Chapter 9 Blood Runs Hotly
Chapter 10 Alert
Chapter 11 The Sky was Black with Planes
Chapter 12 Nerve Endings
Chapter 13 Big Wing
Chapter 14 ‘We Will All Be Here Soon’
Chapter 15 ‘Resist Until the Very End’
Chapter 16 ‘This Was War and We Were Fighting’
Chapter 17 A Dog Called Heinkel
Chapter 18 Rhubarbs
Chapter 19 Knitting, Smoking and Great Literature
Chapter 20 Death Will Send No Warning
Chapter 21 Grounded
Chapter 22 Afterlife
Endnotes
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
‘A beautifully proportioned body and graceful curves just where they should be’. Lord Balfour of Inchyre was one of many pilots who rhapsodised about Spitfires, seen here in formation.
© IWM (CH 740)
Although much joked about at the time, the striking silvery masses of barrage balloons – here protecting shipping – were a valuable tool in Fighter Command’s defensive arsenal and were ubiquitous over London.
© IWM (A 6175)
The Luftwaffe over London. On the night of 7 September 1940, Hitler’s promised retaliation for an RAF raid on Berlin came in the form of wave after wave of bombers. The pilots of Fighter Command managed to shoot down a surprising number.
© IWM (C 5422)
Bentley Priory, on the hilly northern outskirts of London, from which Fighter Command personnel could see London ablaze during the height of the Blitz. In the eighteenth century, the house played host to poets and princes.
© Graham Hill/Stanmoretouristboard
The first Operations Room was set up in the ballroom; whilst a more secure and hi-tech version, including colour-coded clocks, was being constructed beneath the ground.
© IWM/Getty Images via Getty Images
Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (right), architect of the RAF’s defensive fighter network, nicknamed ‘Stuffy’ owing to a perceived dryness of manner, with His Majesty King George VI. In fact, Dowding was much more sensitive – particularly about the welfare of his pilots – than many realised.
© Popperfoto/Getty Images
The Hornchurch station down on the marshes near the Thames – which on autumn mornings would frequently be shrouded with yellow fog – was to prove pivotal throughout the fight for Britain, and was frequently targeted by the Luftwaffe.
© IWM (COL 191)
Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who fought with Dowding, championed the theories of Douglas Bader, and rose to become Air Chief Marshal. Despite their profound differences over tactics, both men shared deeper beliefs: Leigh-Mallory and Dowding were avowed spiritualists.
© Popperfoto/Getty Images
Douglas Bader, centre, surrounded by 11 Group colleagues. It is possible that his disability – both legs amputated after a horrific accident – stoked his ferocity in the air. He was also, for the time, unusually abstemious in the pub. There is a Douglas Bader Foundation today in London, helping children with disabilities.
© IWM (CH 1413)
New Zealand-born Alan Deere, one of many pilots from around the world who came to fight for Britain, originally hailed from a deeply agricultural background but set his heart on flying for the RAF.
© IWM (CH 13619)
Patricia Clark, who worked as a Flight Officer in Fighter Command’s Filter Room, was one of a select group of young women. Her rarefied social background made her war career a voyage of discovery and also inspired her later success as a best-selling novelist.
© Patricia Clark
Max Aitken, pilot son of Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister for Aircraft Production. Aitken was a skilled and flamboyant fighter who caught the attention of Churchill and was friends with fellow pilot Roger Bushell, later better known as the genius behind the Great Escape.
© Popperfoto/Getty Images
Pilot Tony Bartley, who embodied the perceived glamour of Fighter Command; friends with actor David Niven, he was later to marry the film star Deborah Kerr.
© IWM (CNA 125)
The first eyes and ears to see the incoming waves of enemy fighters were members of the Observer Corps. They were often First World War veterans, and were keen to receive proper recognition.
© War Office Official Photographer/IWM via Getty Images
A number of young women volunteered for the Observer Corps, working in hazardously exposed conditions and mastering the calculations of speed and trajectory produced on the ‘Micklethwaite’, an astrolabestyle device.
© Planet News Archive/SSPL/Getty Images
With radar in its infancy, navigation could be dicey, especially in the absence of familiar landmarks; some pilots even used Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable to identify certain lines to guide them back to base.
© IWM (C 1664)
The Operations Room, tracking incoming raids with astonishing accuracy in a precomputer age, was staffed with skilled operators, from young WAAFs to City of London stockbrokers, all of whom were good with instant calculations.
© IWM (CH 7698)
The ground staff at each fighter base became renowned for their forensic devotion; but the pilots were also mesmerised by the workings of their planes.
© William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The signal to scramble was sometimes curiously a relief; the hours beforehand waiting in the mess were, even though pilots never admitted it at the time, a source of great tension.
© Jimmy Sime/CentralPress/Getty Images
During the height of the Battle of Britain pilots found themselves sprinting into action many times a day. That combination of courage and focus, repeated over weeks and months, was an astounding psychological and physical feat.
© Fg. Off. N S Clark/IWM via Getty Images
Chapter One
The Celestial Ballet
‘Be calm,’ Hitler had told the Berlin crowds. ‘He is coming. He is coming.’
Late on the afternoon of 7 September 1940, the warmth of summer lingered in the hazy air over England; and the graceful whorls and curls of white in the blue sky above the South Downs might either have been innocent clouds or the last traces of a distant aerial fight. On the chalk ridges and green slopes below, and in the bustling lanes of south coast towns from Portsmouth to Dover, civilians were making the most of the temporary lull and were tensed for the next attack. For the past few weeks, huge numbers of people had watched with guileless fascination as, high above, planes had swooped and swerved, describing wide circles as they chased one another. From that distance, even an exploding fuel tank hit by gunfire – a split second of glittering gold and orange, followed by the plane simply falling out of the sky – was hypnotic rather than frightening.
It was almost a different war. Across the grey waters of the Channel, on the continent and deep in the darkness of Europe, the conflict had been lumbering, ugly, brutally functional. Vast tanks that jerked and manoeuvred in unnatural lines, vast guns roaring beyond human reason; and everywhere the mortal wreckage of red, glistening vi
scera. But here, high above in the blue, no one could look away from the Spitfires and the Messerschmitts. Every fleet movement, from climbs to dives, had an innate elegance, a geometrical beauty – even as the pilots were flying for their lives.
British pilots had been fighting continuously in these skies for days and weeks; physically and mentally, they had been taken to the edge. The fear that kept them focused during sorties left them exhausted in the aftermath, with the result that many of these men were working by pure instinct. That summer, their squadrons had faced an enemy that seemed not only relentless but also apparently limitless in number. No matter how many German planes they shot out of the sky, the next day brought fresh formations. Perhaps a few RAF pilots sensed just how heavily the odds were stacked against them. Yet, paradoxically, even if they had not been required to risk their lives on an hourly basis, these men would still have been desperate to fly. (By contrast, think of the soldiers who drove tanks; imagine if they yearned to drive a tank for the love of it.) The nature of this war in the air was technologically new, yet as old as Arthurian legend. The RAF pilots were not just warriors. Flying, for them, was a metaphysical pleasure.
But that Saturday, this ‘celestial ballet’, as one mesmerised onlooker had described it, took on a different character. There were specially trained plane-spotters at Dover, at Folkestone, at Lympne, and dotted around the north Kent coast. The job of these volunteers – many of whom, proud men, had served in the First World War – was to report, instantly, the type and the numbers of enemy bombers flying in overhead. On that Saturday, the Observer Corps heard the storm before they saw it; at first a pervasive note, a deep unearthly hum, like some distant male choir. In their small dugouts – often not much more than rudimentary wooden huts – the bells of their telephones had started ringing a little while beforehand. ‘He’ was coming; Hitler, characterising the German air force and its massed bombers as the physical projection of his will, had announced his intentions in a speech to hundreds in Berlin.
A few days before this, the British had launched a bomber assault on Germany; on the night of 25 August 1940, the pilots had flown their planes to the very limit that fuel would allow. Their targets were Berlin’s airport and other strategic sites. As with all bombing raids, there were imprecise hits, collateral damage.
Compared with what was to follow years later, the destruction was not great. But the response to that August raid was incandescent; the Führer’s aim was changed. Forget the RAF airfields and the convoys and the neat tactical targets. Instead: pour hellfire down upon the civilians of London.
The intelligence gathered from Y Service operatives (the ‘Y’ short for ‘wireless’), who were listening in to Luftwaffe messages had confirmed that ‘he was coming.’ The operatives of the coastal radar stations had looked into the cathode ray tubes and seen the assembling force represented as an electronic echo. The number of blips was unprecedented. That afternoon, stations in Dover and Rye picked up the same readings.
The low unearthly hum deepened, acquiring a new timbre or vibration. The Observer Corps volunteers would have been among the first to see them, at 4.15 p.m., through their binoculars. Rows of black dots that grew larger, resolved, drawing closer to the White Cliffs, perfectly unstoppable. These men were not there merely to report on the appalling spectacle. From their small posts on hills high above the sea, on the edges of fields, with instruments like astrolabes set out on tables before them, they started telephoning their observations to the local Observer Corps headquarters in Maidstone, Kent. They reported the numbers of enemy bombers that were flying towards and over them, along with the height at which they were flying (calculated by means of that specially designed instrument). The Observer Corps – like the coastal radar operatives – were among the first to feel the horrified thrill of atavistic awe; rather than the usual enemy formations, these disciplined rows of aeroplanes, black in the sunlight, seemed to be coming line after line. First, about 100 were seen; then 200. Then yet more were reported, coming from different angles, different aerodromes, but heading for one target. An estimated 1,100 German aeroplanes flew in over the south coast that Saturday afternoon. On previous occasions, large formations had fragmented, broken off in varying directions, feinted, lured British pilots into redundant battles while others snaked towards their bombing targets. At tea-time that warm day, these hundreds of German planes were making their way high across the orchards of Kent towards the brown industrial air of the nation’s capital. Waiting until the last possible moment, in order to conserve fuel, RAF pilots, based at aerodromes ringing the capital and dotted throughout the swards of Kent and Sussex, awaited their orders to intercept.
Before any orders went out, the aerodromes needed – very quickly – an idea of where pilots were to fly to, and how many would be needed. They needed to be able to comprehend the scale and purpose of this gargantuan raid. Such intelligence was secretly gathered beneath a property on the northwestern edge of London, in the heart of what poet John Betjeman called ‘Metroland’. In the gardens of Bentley Priory – a grand eighteenth-century house that had once hosted poets and princes – was a large chamber buried some thirty feet beneath the earth. It was to this room that the calculations of the Observer Corps volunteers, together with the readings from the new radar stations, were phoned through, to be instantly received and analysed by volunteers from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in what was called the Filter Room; their calculations – translated into vectors and co-ordinates – were then passed to the Operations Room.
There, on a large map, coloured counters were deployed to represent the forces that were flying in. From here, the intelligence radiated outwards again on telephone lines, to aerodromes up and down the land. The secret bunker and the grand house formed the headquarters of Fighter Command. Bentley Priory was, throughout that summer, the crucible in which the course of the war was shaped.
This cat’s cradle network of intelligence – the bluff old Observer Corps men, the dedicated and intelligent women, and the eager young civilian scientists looking after the brand-new radar technology – had been painstakingly devised by a commander who was misunderstood and treated with cold contempt by his superiors. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding was an austere figure who had throughout his life in the RAF seen the science of flying turn from a rare miracle of daring and aeronautic skill to a new, modern branch of warfare. His Fighter Command system was designed with tremendous skill and care, the armourer’s science and guile supporting the knights of the air.
Despite the availability of some intelligence, none of the women or men who worked in this futuristic control room – with its dials, its headsets, its different coloured lights and colour-coded clocks marked out in red, blue and yellow – would have known earlier on that Saturday precisely when or where the enemy would decide to strike, and with what sort of force. That lunchtime, some of the women, in their uniforms, had taken advantage of the good weather during their breaks; they had lain outside on the grass behind the grand house, smoking cigarettes, listening to the thoughtful hum of bees investigating local wildflowers. Underground, the women on duty were doing what they normally did on quiet days: knitting, writing; though they always had their specially designed telephone headgear at the ready for an alert. Young Gladys Eva, then nineteen, was playing bridge with some of the more senior men; her knack for the game was one of the attributes that had smoothed her recruitment to this top secret establishment.
By 4.30 p.m., the day had been so pleasant that there was a slight haze rising even above the streets of central London. To the east and the north of the capital, the air had a thicker, almost orange quality; though this was not the season of domestic coal burning, the great industries of the East End and the vast docklands kept going with their larger concerns. Fighter Command was about 24 kilometres (fifteen miles) west of here, sitting on the ridge of green hills that enclose the city like a bowl. It would have a grandstand view.
This was the day which would end
with many in London convinced that their world was being torn apart. And yet, paradoxically, this was also the day – 7 September 1940 – which would prove that Fighter Command had triumphed.
That afternoon, the young WAAFs who were about to start their watch hurried around the side of the handsome Italianate house (complete with an imposing bell tower that had, for the purposes of the conflict, been painted a dull green and black by means of camouflage). On the west of the house was the concrete entrance to what was called The Hole.
Down hard concrete steps, the young women would descend some thirty-five feet into a world of artificial light, an hermetic chamber of maps and markers, sharp-eyed observations and focused tension. The Operations Room was bursting with techniques so new that the enemy had not fathomed the extent of them. Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering had, before the war, happily boasted to the likes of American ambassador Joseph Kennedy that his air force, the Luftwaffe, was unquestionably the best in the world. The lethal skill of Goering’s pilots was, by the summer of 1940, perfectly obvious; yet the urgent question of how one successfully could fight off such skill – so central to Dowding’s system – came to dominate the conflict.
Equally, this was an enemy fighting a kind of war so novel that Dowding’s forces were still learning on their feet. And on this day, the Nazi strategy changed dramatically. Before, it had striven to disable Fighter Command. Now, thwarted, it appeared to be set on mindless, murderous vengeance.
At around 4.35 p.m., anyone living near the banks of the Thames on the estuary – the people of Essex and north Kent – would have heard the low yet piercing drone louder than ever before; and they would have seen the first wave of some 350 German aircraft, an almost Wagnerian spectacle. No matter how fast the defending pilots could be alerted and sent into the sky to try and intercept them, this vast force – the mightiest enemy to have made such an incursion into British territory for almost a thousand years – were within minutes of their targets.
Back in the Filter Room, the young women and their commanders, receiving the information from so many observation and radar stations, understood the sickeningly relentless progress of the aggressors. This was the city in which their families still lived. For WAAF officers like Patricia Clark, there were fresh memories of having watched recent air battles with her parents on the fringes of London. The women triangulated the areas over which the Luftwaffe was heading, the lives under the deadliest threat. Very shortly, the working-class populations of East Ham, Poplar, Plaistow and Beckton – and on the south side of the river, Woolwich – felt the ground beneath them undulating, the unsure foundations of their homes shifting, as the first bombs fell.
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